IN recent weeks Africa and the world were gripped by the horrifying images coming out of South Africa, in which thousands of foreigners were hounded out of their homes and businesses by xenophobic mobs and forced to take
refuge in police stations and camps.

The common narrative in trying to explain – or at
least understand – these attacks, is that foreigners (mostly, meaning black
Africans north of the Limpopo) have flooded South Africa, taking away the jobs
and opportunities of locals.

South Africa’s political, economic and social problems
are many, complex and layered, and it is futile trying to outline them all in
one article.

But there’s something in the structure of the South
African economy that partly explains its shocking inequality and crime,
sluggish growth, and why the ruling African National Congress (ANC) government
has struggled to deliver on its promises of prosperity; hence the scapegoating
of “foreign” Africans.

From the Johannesburg Stock Exchange

It starts not in the spaza shops of the Durban or
Johannesburg townships, but on the gleamy floors of the Johannesburg Stock
Exchange.

A few weeks ago, reports out of South Africa indicated
that the number of initial public offerings on Johannesburg’s stock market in
the first quarter of 2015 accelerated to levels not seen since the global financial
crisis, as the benchmark index rose to a record and companies took advantage of
the rally - even as the broader economy is in the doldrums.

In 2014 there were two IPOs in the first quarter, in
2013 just one, and none in 2012.

It seems paradoxical that the stock market would be
doing so well, considering the rest of the economy almost stagnating, with
growth rates now less than 2% and unemployment almost 25%.

While the rand has declined 2.4% against the dollar
this year, the stock market has climbed 6.1% and touched a record in February;
in effect, the JSE bears little resemblance to the economy.

But far from being an aberration, the disconnection
between what happens on the JSE and in the wider South African economy is the
key to understanding the country’s structural problems.

Mining is considered the backbone of South Africa’s
economy, and historically, gold and diamond mines were central in making
the country the richest on the African continent.

But today, the South African economy is actually driven
by its financial sector, which, relative to the economy at large, is one of
the largest in the world.

Data from the World Bank shows South
Africa has the third-biggest market capitalisation relative to GDP in the world
of 160%, second only to Hong Kong and Switzerland - small countries
that are basically financial centres with little activity in other
sectors.

Market capitalisation of the JSE - the share price of
each company, multiplied by its number of shares on the exchange, and then
added together for all the companies - is nearly three times as large as the
country’s GDP.

It’s remarkable that a country of South Africa’s large
size and population could have so much capital concentrated in its financial
markets. The reason for this is rooted in the apartheid era, where mining
barons could not easily stash their profits outside the country, and so ended
up accumulating it within the South African economy itself, and particularly in
the stock markets.

A “Dutch disease”

The effect is a Dutch disease of sorts, where money
multiplies itself endlessly on the stock markets, therefore, there is
little incentive to direct it into the productive economy - resulting in
“jobless growth” and outsized gains for investors in the financial
markets, who are able to comfortably live off interest accrued from their
financial assets and do not necessarily have to build anything
in the labour-absorbing economy in order to create wealth.

The gold and diamond mines reached their peak long
ago, and most of them are now in decline.
But the mining barons don’t really
need today’s profits – which have dwindled anyway, exacerbated by the country’s
expensive and sometimes fractious labour relations – they are living on profits
generated in the 1940s, 50s and 60s.

The end of apartheid meant even better fortunes for
the financial sector. Since 1994, South Africa’s already large and
sophisticated financial services sector grew from 15.3% of GDP to
21.4% of GDP in 2009.

Apart from being over-financialised, which reduces the
incentives to create “real jobs” the other structural problem facing the South
African economy is its over-formalisation.

The informal sector accounts for just 15% of South
African jobs, compared to 70-80% in East Africa, for example.

The reason, again, hearkens back to the
white-dominated economy that apartheid created, where the majority black
population was only valuable for their labour, so any entrepreneurial
self-sufficiency in the black community was stifled, in order to channel them
into the wage economy.

When the ANC came to power, it did so with promises of
redistribution and social justice, but big businesses won the day.

BEE fat cats

The ANC administration has largely been faithful
to the inflation-targeting, economic liberalisation model, with a few
(often politically-connected) blacks allocated rents in the form of the Black
Economic Empowerment (BEE) programme, but the overall structure has
remained intact.

The over-formalisation presents a situation where a mama mboga (roadside vegetable seller) is
expected to a get a food handling inspection license, pay corporate tax, pay
the official minimum wage and provide health insurance for her assistant before
being allowed to open a (physical) shop.

There is no space in such an economy for bodaboda or
okada (motorcycle “taxi”) riders or second-hand goods sellers, and so, no wriggle
room to quickly accommodate the mostly black young people coming of age every
year (the white population has a similar demographic profile to Western countries,
and so does not have the pressure of a youth bulge; that bridge was crossed decades
ago and easily dealt with by pro-white policies of apartheid).

It means that the ordinary black young person has very
narrow options if they want to make a living; and lo and behold, in comes xenophobia
and crime.

And for political reasons, the ANC government can’t
really be very hard on crime, in the style of Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni who,
especially in his first 15 years in office, could do things like put a whole
city on lockdown, flush out thugs and some would be shot, no apologies. Those
kind of things would remind South Africans of the apartheid regime, and would
cost the ANC too much politically to be so heavy-handed “on their own people.”

Of course, there’s so much more to the whole story,
including jealousy, ignorance, lack of skills and a sense of entitlement to
goodies as part of the “fruits” of winning the struggle against apartheid.

But other times, you can find some of the answers in
boring government economic data.

So next time you’re in a horrendous Lagos traffic jam
and an okada guy zooms past nearly knocking off your side mirror, don’t curse,
smile; he represents an important “safety valve” in many of Africa’s informal economies.